This blog is to help give T-Shirt artists a better sense of direction In Photoshop separations. This guide is the first of it's kind to
help understanding how to simulate channels to screens on the press and have the shirt match the art on the computer.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

This design was not my creation. I merely interpreted the colors to reproduce it on a natural color T-shirt, I had to split 8 colors in Photoshop channels to create the slight variations in each frog after it prints on the press.

The image on the left is the color and the image on the right is way the film looks.

The first color I pulled out were the reds for mixing. Since red is an overpowering color, this may need to change on the press to a different shade, so I will separate the pure reds from this.

The next color is the yellow blends. You can see what starts to happen as you blend just 2 colors at different densities together, and you start seeing a lot of variations with just two colors. This is close to how it will look on the press as it is printed.

Next is the blue. Not much, but it is there. In order to make the final as close as I can to the original and there is room on the press, I will use it.

The next color is the pure reds that I knock out of the previous blending red so they do not interfere with each other on the press.

Next is the greens. With a cyan blue I could have blended this with yellow, but the one I used previously was not good to make greens.

This black is a based down process black with just enough pigment to shade different tones of the colors already printed.

The next black is more solid and gives the design definition as you can see on the image next to it.

The highlight white is to blend in and cover some of the dot gains on the printing process. It also smooths out and helps to give the design a little more dimensionality like the original.

Next, the separation is brought into Illustrator where the typeface, legend and registration marks are added. From there each color is printed on film to create the individual screens. In this case, 10 screens were made to print this job.

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About Me

I am an active Senior Graphic Designer in the T-shirt printing industry and Digital graphics. Most of my freelance is Adobe Photoshop channel color separations for screen printing companies world wide. I will also teach techniques in Adobe Illustrator. This blog is to share with other artists on some of these techniques.